The long-awaited new novel from the award-winning author of The Grass Sister tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and the high-jumping horse circuit prior to the Second World War. A love story of impossible beauty and sadness, it is also a chronicle of dreams ‘turned inside out’, and miracles that never last, framed against a world both tender and unspeakably hard.

With Armour, the great Australian poet John Kinsella has written his most spiritual work to date and his most politically engaged. The world in which these poems unfold is strangely poised between the material and the immaterial, and everything which enters it, kestrel and fox, moth and almond, does so illuminated by its own vivid presence: the impression is less a poet honouring his subjects than uncannily inhabiting them.

The shadow girl never imagined she’d live on the streets. After her parents disappear, life with her aunt and uncle takes a sinister turn. Terrified that the authorities will believe her uncle over her, she flees. She tricks her way into a new school and pretends to have a loving family. No one knows she sleeps in rail yards, sand dunes and abandoned houses. At school she meets the author she will call on years later. Together they piece together the story of how she survived, who helped her, and the friend she wishes she could have saved. Thrilling, profound and blackly funny, The Shadow Girl is John Larkin’s best and most important novel to date.